Finally, a quiet Xbox 360

Frustrated by the constant din of his Xbox 360, [Janne Ström] took action. The original case wouldn’t have near enough room for the additional cooling that needed to be installed, so he picked up Lian Li’s XB01 case replacement. He followed the illustrated disassembly guide to get the Xbox stripped down to just its motherboard. He then began fitting his coolers of choice: two massive Noctua NH-U9D0 units originally intended for AMD Opterons. The asymmetric heat sinks are intended for applications like this where dual sockets could make other devices difficult to place. Clearly the hardest part of the installation was applying an appropriate amount of thermal compound and then slowly tightening the hold down screws to guarantee even pressure. The resultant system ended up being quieter than the first camera he attempted to record it with and the attached power supply. You can see a video of it below.

I have been trying to find a direct replacement to the stock heat sinks for months now. the stock holes are 60mm*60mm (at least on mine)I have not been able to find anything to fit those. I never thought about putting a larger one diagonally across the chip. by the way if any one knows of any more heat sinks that will fit the x box I would be very grateful.

Better to just go out and buy a 60GB Jasper 360 and install the games to the HDD. Not only will you save on parts but you’ll have a smaller footprint and will ultimately save money on power consumption too. There would also be little point in trying to fit a SSD drive for the reasons already outlined (incompatibility with the hddss.bin configuration) as well as the fact the current HDD is barely heard. Good idea 2 years ago, but not now. MS have finally gotten their act together and are making reliable 360’s (it’s a shame the same cannot be said for Sony’s PS3 – check the Playstation boards for people with issue after the last update!)

Well aren’t you just a little downer… Have you never heard of overkill? it’s a good thing to have. Besides, no matter how quiet the XBOX360 HDD is, it still has moving parts and as such, still makes noise. So no, this is NOT a pointless hack… It’s quite the opposite, a very useful hack. And for people who just enjoy doing things like this, it is a wonderful and assimilating endeavor. For you to say that it is pointless is liken unto saying that the creators of the XBOX it’s self – or any other gaming system for that matter – had no business even working on such foolishness.

Jsut to say that there is no need for this hack now. As said before most of the noise comes from the DVD drive and now with the new NXE dashboard you can copy the data to your hard drive and so there is no need for DVD to run whilst running the game. Though i do have to say that there is still noise from the start up, but that does not last that long at all.

The 360 is optimized to run from a DVD. M$ did so because of the modding of the first Xbox and it’s a two birds with one stone concept, deter modders from pirating games to their HDD’s and also so the games could be played with no lag.